Conditioning
by hydroponic pharmaceuticals
Summary: Doc Scratch teaches the young Handmaid how to properly serve her future lord in a rather hands-on method. Doc Scratch/underage!Handmaid noncon.


She poked one of the needles that she kept-that she was forced to keep-in her hair at an exposed outlet. A tiny spark lazily traveled from the outlet, through and around her steel chopstick, and gently shocked her gray hand. Her fingernails were impeccably painted, in a vibrant shade of green.

Whenever she could, she used her blunt teeth to scrape the paint off of her nails. A small rebellion, certainly, but it always went noticed. Often within seconds, she'd be discovered, then quickly, so quickly, the vile paint would be reapplied and she would be chastised and reminded of how the green was meant to serve as a reminder of her future master and her future life of subservience.

She wanted nothing more to die, and her current caretaker knew well of this fact.

Among her kind, who she had heard of only in old stories, the others who shared in her blood were fated to die far younger than their comrades and compatriots. They were blessed. They were as mayflies, gone in the blink of her yellow eye.

She raised a single shining needle to her eye and quietly wondered what privilege she would lose for gouging it out. How long it would take for her awful current master to see her ruined socket, how long it would take him to regenerate her eyeball, how long he would suspend her breathing privilege this time. Perhaps he would leave her as a cyclops for a while, to remind her of her disobedience. The thought was lovely.

He would not let her apply her own makeup, would not let her paint her own nails that sickening shade of green, would not let her dress or bathe or feed herself. When his cloth hands traveled over her naked body she could feel his awful voice wriggling its way into her mind, telling her how if she only behaved like a proper young lady he wouldn't have to do this, wouldn't have to restrict her freedoms like he did.

She scoffed at the thought. If she bent to him, she would only be willfully relinquishing her free will to his whims. She would still be his enslaved captive, the only difference being that she would be deluding herself into believing that she was happy while doing it.

It was awful, how he had conditioned her. Even now, as she traced the outlet's shape with her needle, she could faintly feel the memory of his gloved hands tracing her jaw...

This had back when she was still allowed to dress herself. Back when she had no reason to disobey. She had been younger then, much younger. How many sweeps was she now? She couldn't be more than seven sweeps, though the passing of time was strange and fluid in her emerald cage.

She had been five sweeps old, and she had tried her hardest to use her small hands to button the complicated shirt that had been provided to her by her caretaker. But the strings had frayed under the force of her fingers and the shirt had positively ruined itself. She sobbed and begged forgiveness, for she knew that she would certainly face a dire punishment. He would suffocate her again, he would cut off her oxygen supply. The air pressure would drop and she would be outside, alone, in the cold with no air and no floor.

But instead he took her by the hand and mended her shirt in the blink of an eye. It was a cold sort of kindness, one without precedent. His hands were not yet quite so dreaded then; his presence not yet quite so feared. When she had been even younger he had even acted like a surrogate lusus to her. His fabric was so white, contrasting the omnipresent green of their shared hive-no, house. That had been what he called their abode.

The next time she dressed herself, she had managed to not mangle the buttons. She had been able to fit the elegantly tied knots into their corresponding loops with considerably more ease than before, and stood proud before the strange man who kept her safe and raised her to her fullest potential.

He smiled, or he would have smiled if only he had a mouth, and expressed his great pleasure at her ladylike conduct and... Obedience. He told her that he would reward her, while simultaneously training her for yet another service she would inevitably provide her future master.

His hands felt wrong on her face that day, their touch feeling cheap and vile rather that reassuring and lususly.

"Damara," his voice barely a whisper inside her head, pressing up entirely wrongly inside the crevices of her skull. "Handmaid," the vanilla-white letters branded themselves on her thinkpan.

His gloves were smooth and tasted like nothing as he pried her rust-red lips apart.

And she did not know, could not know, for he had never taught this lesson-

He had been teaching her, training her for a life of servitude.

The first lesson was unflinching obedience. This he had conditioned her into through many sweeps of fear and terror and sudden transportation. Her caretaker-no, her captor-was all stick and no carrot.

Later, she would wish that he'd stayed that way.

The second lesson was subservience. She did menial tasks around the hive-the home-without rest, break, or abatement. She cooked meals he would never eat (they vanished to unknown locales several hour later), swept rooms he would never set foot in, sat dutifully at his side as he faced the fenestrated plane (he was faceless, and yet he faced in every direction).

She was a good servant in domestic matters by her fifth sweep. Now it was time to teach her the third lesson.


End file.
